Twenty Years Of Molly
by Tumblr Ate My Soul
Summary: Her hair is blood red, an unusual shade to grace the Weasley family tree but it makes her feel special, red in the sea of orange; and Lucy's special, too and that makes her even happier, because they're the same but still special in their own ways, Lucy with her chestnut locks and her with her blood red curls. Please review


The day Molly Weasley was born wasn't the happiest day of her mother or her father's life. Actually, even though they kept insisting it was for years after, she knows quite well it was a downright miserable day for them. She knows it was the day her father got into a fistfight with one of his brothers (she can't remember which one but it doesn't matter, anyway). She also knows that was the day her mother spent seven hours in the excruciating pain of labour and the day her father fainted six times. She's aware of the fact that the day of her younger sister's birth passed much easier. Still, when her father tells her, years later, that it was the happiest day of his life, she believes him.

She's two when she decides Lucy's crying is a horrible sound and, with a determination never before seen in any tiny two year old girl, she walks over and creates colourful sparks in front of her sister's eyes and, as Lucy's cries die down, she knows the two of them are forever. Her father almost pisses his pants in excitement over her first ever performing of magic and both her and Lucy get sweets for dinner, later that evening. Her mother doesn't comprehend the fuss but she gladly complies and pours a ridiculous amount of rainbow sprinkles into their hands when they ask for it.

She's three when she realises she just might be the prettiest girl to ever have graced the Earth. It just hits her one day when she accidentally glances into the mirror they have hung in their hallway. Catching a glimpse of her own deep green eyes, the colour of emerald, she's enchanted and she spends hours just looking at them. She stares at Lucy, later and her sister's icy blue eyes, she decides, are just as perfect as her own. The next day, she explains to her cousin Victorie how she and Lucy are the most beautiful girls in the world and Victorie mocks and laughs and calls her ugly but she doesn't care.

When she's four, she decides her sister is too nice for her own good. She decides a toughening up is in order for her three year old protégée so she cuts off all of her sisters shiny curls with kitchen scissors and when their mother sees, she just doesn't understand her shrieks and horror, she believes Lucy looks much meaner with the new hairstyle and she says so to their mother. Lucy defends her, too, but their mother decides Molly needs to be grounded for a week anyway. Molly feels ecstatic, though, when Lucy takes a seat beside her and they wait out Molly's punishment together.

Her hair is blood red, an unusual shade to grace the Weasley family tree but it makes her feel special, red in the sea of orange; and Lucy's special, too and that makes her even happier, because they're the same but still special in their own ways, Lucy with her chestnut locks and her with her blood red curls. It sometimes makes her worry, though, makes her feel like they're doing something wrong by being so different; because their cousins hardly ever talk to them and the only person that seems to even remotely like them out of their entire extended family is Hugo. She learns to understand, with age, that being special is a lot better than having the attention of people that don't even like you (and never will).

When she's six, two months after her mother's dead and buried, she's at a family gathering and everyone's cheerful and she watches her sister try to explain how sad she is to Rose and how she wishes Mummy was still there and sees her getting a cold shoulder from all of their cousins. She knows Lucy's got the heart of gold and she knows these children are breaking her lovely little sister but she lets it slide until Rose yells out at Lucy to 'just get over it for goodness' sake' and she snaps. It's the first time her magic manifested itself so strongly and it takes her hours to calm down but she sets Rose's dress on fire and makes all of the hair Victorie's so proud of fall off before her father even manages to reach her and she feels proud beyond belief when she sees her sister smile slightly through her tears at Rose's shrieks.

At the tender age of seven, her father enrols her into a Muggle school where they teach her about numbers and animals and lots of other things and she likes it. She especially likes the fact that her teacher lets her play with numbers while other children waste their time drawing. And when she sees her equation pinned up on the board next to other children's silly colourful stick figures, she feels prouder than ever. She decides, then, that she will continue to play with numbers forever.

She's eight when she realises the rest of the Weasley-Potter clan hates her Daddy. She realises it so suddenly that it makes her reel in surprise at the discovery and she does the best she can in hopes of quenching the doubt it ignites. The reason for her thoughts is quite obvious, though, and it can't be helped when she reaches the conclusion she was right. After that, every scowl Uncle Bill gives her Daddy, every shove she receives from Uncle George and every hateful look she sees directed at Lucy ignites a fire burning deep and steady within her. It takes two years before she convinces her father to stop taking them to family gatherings and, when he finally caves, she realises none of them really miss the company.

When she's nine, she comes home from school crying. Her father and her sister try their best to get the reason for her distress out of her but she doesn't budge and, when she refuses to go back again, Percy tells the teacher he'd prefer it if Molly were homeschooled like Lucy. She never goes back and she never tells anyone a girl in her class called her a strange freak while boys pulled her hair and kicked her, again and again. No one ever sees the bruises, either.

She's ten when she meets Teddy Lupin for the first time, solely by accident, and she's mesmerised by his hair. As his eyes stop on her, his hair goes the strangest, most interesting shade of blue she'd ever seen and she decides on impulse that blue is her favourite colour. The meeting's awkward because Aunt Ginny and Uncle Harry are there, along with James, Lily and Albus, and they all glare at her Daddy and Lucy and her and she'd probably be furious but she's buying her Hogwarts supplies and she's fixated on Teddy Lupin's hair and she doesn't care enough about any of them to notice. She ropes her father into buying her paint in the exact shade of Teddy's hair and they paint her walls electric blue the very same day.

It's her first day of school and she's eager and she hopes with all her might that she might chance a glance at the Lupin boy on the train station, even though she's not quite sure why. When they get there, she does see him but, he's standing next to James and wishing him luck and he doesn't even glance in her direction once. Later, when she gets settled on the train, she sneaks off to the bathroom and cries bitter tears of disappointment. She's not quite sure why.

She's not surprised when Lucy ends up in Hufflepuff and she feels that the fact neither of them are in Gryffindor (unlike all of their cousins) is just one more thing that makes them better than the rest of the Weasleys. She gets the Hufflepuff password from Lucy within days and she makes sure no one even glances at her sister funny and any time someone asks her why the two of them never talk to their cousins, she says how they're not related; she instructs Lucy to do the same and they keep on existing, together against the world.

She's thirteen when she first kisses a boy and it's Lysander Scamander and she's not thrilled and it doesn't shake her world and she sneaks into Lucy's dormitory late that night and cries. Lucy just holds her, doesn't make the mistake of uttering the comforting words (because it really isn't going to be alright). She feels cornered when he asks for another kiss, though, so she complies and, kiss by kiss, they turn out to be boyfriend and girlfriend and it scares her to death. When Lucy and her get off the train at the end of that year, she searches the crowd for an electric blue shock of hair and, even though she's holding Lysander's hand, she feels her heart drop into her stomach as she sees Teddy Lupin, his hair blood red like hers, holding Victorie like the most precious gem he'll ever be in the presence of. Lysander doesn't notice a thing and she hates him for it a bit.

Lysander never understands anything she tries to tell him and it makes her frustrated. She gets tired of explaining why she thinks Arithmancy is the most fascinating branch of magic she's ever accosted and why she dotes on Lucy so much and why she gets jittery every time she enters the DADA classroom. And, after all, how could she explain to her boyfriend that the only reason she even appears in those classes is that Teddy Lupin has been teaching them since September? And how could she explain how much faster her blood flows when he so much as glances in her direction? And his hair stays red but she glimpses a bit of that same electric blue every once in a while, only while he's watching her, though. She paints her nails the exact shade his eyes take on while he's smiling (and it's lavender and it makes her melt) and when he gives points to Ravenclaw and smiles at her while doing it, she just knows she has this tiny, barely there, chance to end up with him in the end. All of that makes her resent Lysander, though, and she sometimes feels regret for mistreating him but she knows he'll stick even though she doesn't want him to and she keeps him around as the backup for the real thing, just in case (no one wants to end up all alone, least of all her).

She starts smoking around the beginning of her fifth year. She's a Prefect and she confiscated the cigarettes from Scorpius Malfoy and they burn her throat and lungs and make her want to puke but they cause a tangible pain that distracts from the indefinable one she can't pinpoint the cause of. She feels a presence next to her but she doesn't turn because she doesn't quite like the colour blue at the moment and she doesn't quite like that she's wearing it, either and when he only takes the pack from her hands and lights his own cigarette, she breathes out a gust of smoke and sighs as she watches it twirl around her bloody locks. She feels a small box pushed gently into her palm and she focuses on it and not the fact that everything hurts a little less when he's near. She pops it open and sees a dazzling ring and all of the pain she's ever felt evaporates and, as she turns to tell him she loves him, he asks if she thinks Victorie'll say yes. She closes the box, ice suddenly spreading through her veins, and then she gives it back and wrenches the cigarette pack from his fingers. 'Go away, will you?' And he leaves her all alone. She cries in Lucy's bed again but now it lasts for months and she smokes every night.

Months come and go and they get invitations to 'The wedding of Victorie Weasley and Teddy Lupin' and she burns them before she even sees the date. She's not too surprised, though, when she hears (from her own boyfriend, no less) that Victorie picked the date of her sixteenth birthday. She still rages and rants but only Lucy's around to witness it and they spend her birthday roaming the Muggle London and stuffing themselves with candy. She doesn't get a single present from the Weasleys but Teddy sends her a journal in that infernal electric blue that kept giving her hope and a bottle of lavender ink. She pushes them to the bottom of her underwear drawer without even opening them and decides to ignore their existence.

She's seventeen and she feels free to just run away from the world. She doesn't, though, she just says yes when Lysander proposes and she feels kind of broken as she packs her stuff to move in with him. She opens the journal before she can think better of it and sees pages covered in Teddy's handwriting, sentences like 'Please, come today' and 'I love you' and 'Please just...please stop this' all written in lavender ink. Lucy finds her, hours later, curled up on the floor, crying her eyes out and choking on her own tears. Her sister sends Lysander a missive and gets their father to pull some strings at the ministry so Molly would be allowed to take the NEWTs without attending classes that year and, before the summer ends, Lysander has his ring back, Molly has twelve NEWTs in the bag and her sister ships her off to an apprenticeship in Arithmancy, somewhere near Florence.

Italy becomes her and she feels happy and detached and wonders, from time to time, if her sister hexed her before sending her on her way. And now she's eighteen and her apprenticeship is over and she's heading home and it scares her to death. Her sister's about to start her last year of school, too, so they make arrangements and Molly finds an apartment in Muggle London for the two of them while Lucy's at school. Her father cries a bit when they both move out but he lets them and repeats how proud they make him feel and, by Christmas, they're both living in a small two bedroom apartment near Diagon Alley. It takes a while but she finds a job and starts earning money and for once, everything's fine. She doesn't realise she hadn't smoked in two years until she glimpses his face in the crowd one day.

She's smoking again and Lucy just rolls her eyes and opens the window every time the smoke starts curling around her. The new job she has is more stressful than she expected but she doesn't mind because it takes her mind off things and helps make her a little less unhappy than before. Her co-workers gossip too much, she realises one day after being forced to listen of Teddy and Victorie's marriage problems for an hour and, even though gossip isn't quite her forte, she soaks up every word. Lucy congratulates her, days later, on smoking less than usual and she grins a secretive smile. Victorie's a divorcee months later and she never loved the grapevine more.

He's at her door at three in the morning and Lucy pulls her out of bed and drags her to him, grumbling along the way. They don't talk and they don't make any grand gestures, they just sit in silence for hours and she breathes him in. His hair is electric blue and his eyes are lavender and he stays and they both stop smoking.

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Please review, love,

TAMS


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